Rustin > Rustin's Quotes

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain

“I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“‎Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
― Dale Carnegie

“The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men; if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbours, and, failing them, to himself: for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind. Just as he who makes himself a worse man does harm not only to himself but to all those to whom he might have done good if he had made himself a better one, so he who deserves well of himself does good to others by the very fact that he is preparing what will be of service to them.”
― Seneca, Dialogues

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King